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Playing it safe isn’t an option for Toronto Maple Leafs

James Reimer #34 of the Toronto Maple Leafs gets set to face a shot against the Boston Bruins in Game Four of the Eastern Conference Quarterfinals during the 2013 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs on May 8, 2013 at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.Photo: Claus Andersen/Getty Images

TORONTO — The puck slid off Phil Kessel‘s stick toward the blue line and Dion Phaneuf had to make a decision. Go for it, or fall back? Take a chance, or be safe? Safe doesn’t usually hurt you. Safe means another chance. Safe doesn’t tend to win games in overtime, but it doesn’t tend to lose them, either.

Nathan Horton was pushing off his skates and turning toward the puck, and in a split-second Phaneuf decided he could get there first. He took two strides in from the blue line. He wasn’t scared. He went for it. The puck got clipped by Horton, and David Krejci went the other way and scored, and Toronto is now down 3-1 in their first-round series with the Boston Bruins, which means we’re almost at the point where everybody goes to shake hands.

Now, Phaneuf was criticized for this, which is fair; it was, as he said over and over, a bad mistake. He read the play wrong, misjudged it. It’s not what you want from your No. 1 defenceman, though that doesn’t mean Phaneuf isn’t one. He was playing his 31st minute, and some people in the NHL will tell you he tends to wear down after too many minutes, but such is the nature of human existence, for most of us.

But Phaneuf was doing one thing that his teammates were doing throughout the tied third period and overtime — he was attacking. It’s how the Leafs played, at their best.

“I think we’ve got to go out and play like we did (Wednesday) night,” said Carl Gunnarsson, Phaneuf’s defence partner who was not on the ice when the winning goal was scored. “Minimize some mistakes, but I mean, we can’t sit back and be afraid not to make mistakes. We’ve got to out there and play our game.

“I thought we did a good job of it. Sometimes you just want to sit back and not make those mistakes, right? And I think we had some chances to win the game and it could have gone our way.”

And besides, conservatism killed the Leafs as badly as aggression did.

In this, Gunnarsson is correct. Factoring in stakes and stage, it was the best hockey game played in Toronto in recent memory, partly because it wasn’t played safe, on either side. Toronto had the better chances in overtime — Joffrey Lupul in the slot, Matt Frattin off the post — because they were aggressive, because when given the choice they did not choose safety. Both teams skated downhill given half a chance, and the sound in the building rose and fell, veered and hushed.

And besides, conservatism killed the Leafs as badly as aggression did. When Krejci took the puck the other way, Leafs defenceman Ryan O’Byrne — out there instead of Gunnarsson, who had just jumped off at the end of a shift — didn’t pressure Krejci, because he didn’t see that Kessel had chased down Milan Lucic on the other side of the 2-on-1. Instead O’Byrne backed up into nowhere, and Krejci, the most dangerous man in these playoffs thus far, found a place for the puck.

It wasn’t being overly aggressive that killed the Leafs. It wasn’t being overly conservative. It was one, then the other, on two mistakes. It was judgment calls made at high speed under heavy pressure. That’s not exceptional; it’s just playoff hockey.

“You’re learning stuff about yourself every day in the playoffs, I think,” said Gunnarsson. “For a lot of guys it’s a new experience, how you deal with all the pressure, and playing every other night, every game a big game, all of that … It could have been earlier in the game, too, when somebody pinches down, and they almost got it. The margins are not very big right now.”

“I know that our work ethic was strong,” said Leafs head coach Randy Carlyle after Game 4. “I know that we played the game at a pretty high tempo. I know that it’s disappointing that we had a two-goal lead, then we give three straight up, but then we came back and found a way to tie the hockey game, and I thought in overtime we were attacking. We were definitely taking the puck and the play to the net, and that is what we designed. In our minds we were doing a lot of the things we wanted to do, but in the end we made a mistake.”

The question, now, is what is left to learn, and how. If the Leafs are going to have any chance of dragging this series back to Toronto they will have to play the same way. They will have to play unafraid of the consequences, because that’s what good teams do. Elimination games are games played without a net, and we will learn a lot about these young Leafs by how they play while dangling over the edge.

On Thursday, Carlyle was asked about one of Kessel’s decisions and said, “You’re asking me to criticize a player’s selection of what he does; what I’m saying is that’s why players are what they are.”

Well, Game 5 may be Toronto’s last chance to be what they are, or more to the point, to find out what they are. There is no margin for error left.

After graduating from the University of British Columbia, Bruce Arthur joined the Post in 2001 as a sports reporter. After covering the Toronto Raptors, he became the paper's basketball columnist in 2005... read more, its Toronto columnist in 2007, and its national columnist in 2008. His work currently appears across the Postmedia chain three times a week. Arthur was born in Vancouver, is married, and lives in Toronto.View author's profile